Manual of Architectural Possibilities

As many people who attended my book launch this past weekend in New York will already know, I had on hand a fantastic new publication by architect David Garcia: the Manual of Architectural Possibilities, or M.A.P.

[Images: M.A.P. by David Garcia].

I had the pleasure of meeting David back in Sweden earlier this month at the ASAE conference; David’s presentation and our subsequent conversation – ranging from the architecture of déjà vu and haunted house novels to the possibility of sonic archives and the work of David Gissen – were more than enough to show that he is pushing forward through some incredibly interesting ideas and is already someone worth keeping an eye on now, not just in the future. He’s even just completed a cool children’s playground in suburban Denmark.

Issue One of M.A.P. – or poster #1, really, as it all unfolds into a double-sided A1 sheet – is about Antarctica.

[Image: M.A.P. by David Garcia].

Open the poster up and there are habitats excavated directly from the ice, their dimensions and size based on the carving radius of industrial digging machines; there are seed archives entombed throughout the polar glaciers, marked only by GPS; there are abandoned airplanes all hooked together into a grounded megastructure and reused as research labs; there is a catalog of snow crystal geometry; and there is a photo-survey of exploratory housing for visiting scientists.

Look for M.A.P. at an architecture bookstore near you, or get in touch with David Garcia Studio directly to order some copies.

M.A.P. #2 – which is, incidentally, open for suggestions – will be about “Archives.” And future M.A.P.s are impossible not to daydream about: a M.A.P. for prisons, gardens, earthquakes, architecture school, the moon…